Sundar Pichai, the CEO (chief executive officer) of Alphabet Inc. and its subsidiary Google is closing in on achieving the billionaire status. Since Pichai took over as the CEO of Google in 2015 the stocks have dramatically risen more than 400%, outclassing the S&P 500 and Nasdaq.

On Friday, the stocks reached a new all-time high after the earning report of the first quarter exceeded expectations, amid an AI boom in cloud computing. This growth allowed the company to introduce dividends for the first time.

The rise accompanied by some major stock awards has made him one of the world's highest-paid executives. This has improved his chances of achieving that milestone of becoming the first non-founder tech billionaire.

Pichai, the Indian-origin man hailing from Chennai had a tough childhood, struggling for basic necessities at times like proper running water. The young Pichai got attracted towards tech at the age of 12 when the family got their first rotatory telephone. His father's job as an electrical engineer further attracted him towards tech, Pichai said in an interview.

Pichai did his engineering from IIT Kharagpur after excelling at studies in school. Following this he won a scholarship to Stanford University. He was appointed as a product manager at Google in 2004, where he led major projects like Google Toolbar and Google Chrome. This came after he earned an advanced degree from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and a stint as a consultant at McKinsey.

In 2014 Pichai said in an interview, "My dad and mom did what a lot of parents did at the time, They sacrificed a lot of their life and used a lot of their disposable income to make sure their children were educated."

Keval Desai, Pichai's colleague from the initial years of his job at Google said, "Pichai's humility and ability to build consensus emerged early on. He's not looking to be the most dominant voice, "He's very comfortable in his own skin. It allowed him very early on to be a great facilitator across these strong, opinionated people."

In 2015 Pichai was selected as the CEO of Google by Larry Page when he became the CEO of the newly formed Alphabet, which Pichai took over in 2019 following the step back of Page and co-founder Sergey Brin from day-to-day management.

"There is no one that we have relied on more since Alphabet was founded, and no better person to lead Google and Alphabet into the future," Brin and Page, who combined have a net worth of almost $300 billion, wrote Pichai in a 2019 letter.

His net worth includes $424 million in current shareholdings and roughly $600 million from share sales since he became CEO. Bloomberg's wealth index assumes those sales were taxed and reinvested in the stock market.

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